As usual, the first edition for year 2015 of the Ranking Web of Repositories, that it is published since 2008, is available with data updated during July.. Next edition will be published at the end of July 2015.

The main aim of the Ranking Web of Repositories is not really to rank them, but to promote Open Access initiatives and global access to academic knowledge. Following that objective we promote good practices, especially those intended to increase the visibility and usage of the OA contents.

The indicator used for estimating the visibility (impact) of the items deposited in the repositories is the number of external inlinks they received, considering as the targeted URLs those that are using the domain or subdomain of the repository. For example:

The role of librarians in the Open Access movement has been very important as they are the main designers, promoters and maintainers of institutional repositories. The basic principles behind the current arrangement of repositories are inspired by the librarianship techniques.

However, some decisions guided by these principles are probably hampering the universal adoption of the Open Access initiatives (OAI), as they are ignoring the main users of these repositories: scientists, researchers, scholars.

One of the most frequently used arguments in favor of depositing papers in a repository is to preserve the rights of the hosted institutions that pay the research done by the authors of those papers. Most of these rights usually refer to exploitation rights but many times the even more important moral rights are forgotten. Moral rights intends to preserve the authorship and integrity of the document (nobody can overwrite the text or usurp the author) that can be also extended to the institutional authorship.

The portal consists of three different rankings. The main one consists of all the subject (like Arxiv or RepEc) and institutional repositories ranked by normalization against the best (maximum) value. The second ranking is built from the subset of only the institutional repositories. Although the raw values used are the same, the procedure is done against different maximums so the ranks obtained are independent from the ones in the former ranking.